“You here meet a law in God’s great nature that is hard to understand. If you condemn yourself, you stand condemned before God. Therefore, we urge upon you the necessity of settling the matter, according to the directions of Christ: “If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”
This is to say, after you have become reconciled, after you have made reparation for wrong that you have done, then come and offer your gift, your self-sacrifice to the Lord, and you will be accepted. You have reconciled the matter of error when you have properly weighed and balanced the matter and have reached a clear understanding and have made a firm decision not to allow such error to occur again. Then you are free to go forward in your attainment of a new and higher consciousness of the Divine Life.
When you have thoroughly enlisted in the work, you will find that there is a consciousness within you which the church calls “conscience”, which will justify or condemn you in all that you do. But as we have heretofore set forth, this conscience justifies you if you live up to what you believe to be right, and it will condemn you if you do that which you believe to be wrong, whether or not it be right or wrong in reality. Therefore, it is necessary that you should know the truth, that the truth may make you free from false beliefs.
We have here made only a suggestion for you to think about, for the field is too large to write fully on the subject, but you who would attain oneness with the Body of the Christ must think often on the subject and must desire to know the truth. The more thoroughly the mind can be illuminated, and the greater the mental activity that can be attained, the more clearly will you be able to discern the truth.
Here again, the church has been deceived. The apostle said, “The mind of the flesh is death; but the mind of the spirit is life and peace; because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” The mind of the flesh is the intellect whose office is to think of the necessities of the body. Is that evil? Not unless you worry about it. If you become anxious and worried about providing for the body, then such worrying is evil; or if your whole time is occupied in providing for the body, it is evil. Remember, Christ said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
You will not go far in the way that we have marked out before you will realize that you have a double consciousness, that your mind may be busy with the things of the world, with the duties of life, and the soul at the same time will be centered upon God, and even be busy in the world of spirit, so that when you have finished the material duties, you find that there is active within you a loving unity with Divinity, and that the soul had been carrying on the thought of the Spirit.
But here again you may be deceived. It is the office of the soul, or inner consciousness, to bring to your external consciousness or reasoning mind, the great truths, a few of which we have endeavored in this work to bring to your understanding. Your external consciousness is manifest by virtue of your reasoning brain. When the reasoning brain has been illuminated by the soul and you are able to think, to reason, and to understand the truth, then you feel the redeeming power of that truth in the body as well as in the soul; this is what is meant by being spiritually minded.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 